L. remembers exactly what her son was wearing one winter evening nine years ago. She can still see every detail: the blue Angry Birds T-shirt, the black Bakugan hoodie unzipped down the front, the jeans that had once been bedazzled and that still faintly bore the heart-shaped pattern where the …
Read More »Farewell to a Fascist: Biden, Washington, and America Pick Up the Pieces
Two days before the inauguration, I talk with my dad about Joe Biden. With the pandemic, I hadn’t been in Washington, D.C., for two years, so it is much overdue. Dad and Joe have much in common. Dad is 47 days younger, and I assume is stupefied that his aged …
Read More »The Birth of QAmom
With her bouncy, honey-streaked hair, tastefully pastel-and-beige-hued grid and effortless ability to wear such garments as shapeless khaki rompers, Ciara Chanel Self, a Dallas, Texas-based interior designer and parent of a toddler, appears on Instagram to be the prototypical mom influencer. She regularly posts aspirational photos of cream-colored nurseries, 2-year-olds’ …
Read More »Bad Bunny en Cautiverio
E n alguna parte de la costa norte de Puerto Rico, el cantante se encuentra en un modesto Airbnb con paredes blancas y un techo cubierto de hierba falsa. En el interior, la joven superestrella de la isla lucha contra el aburrimiento como puede. Estamos a mediados de marzo, días …
Read More »In Brazil, a LGBTQ Sex Worker's Struggle to Survive
In Brazil’s northern state of Bahia, in its capital city of Salvador, there’s a narrow road tucked between an abandoned colonial mansion and a private hospital. Leading downhill, it’s the kind of street Uber drivers don’t know exists unless you specifically point them to it. Ankle-breakingly steep, it’s uninviting in …
Read More »'I'm Just Sick of Zombies, Man': Jim Jarmusch on 'The Dead Don't Die'
There are dozens of filmmakers who get giddy at the thought of orchestrating an army of extras, all made up to look as if the flesh is rotting on their bones, all shuffling forward as if battling rigor mortis, all moaning and grasping and jaws chomping in anticipation. Jim Jarmusch …
Read More »The Hell With Broadway: The Story of Anais Mitchell's 'Hadestown'
The set of Hadestown, the Broadway musical up for 14 Tony Awards on June 9th, incorporates wildly swinging lamps and a trap door that hurls people into the underworld. But as the show’s auteur, Anaïs Mitchell, demonstrates, the show wasn’t always so hi-tech. Putting down the iced beverage she’s sipping …
Read More »'I Felt I Had to Make It': Ava DuVernay on Why the Central Park Five Story Still Matters
The morning after Ava DuVernay’s four-part Netflix miniseries about the Central Park Five, When They See Us, premiered at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, she was in a daze. “I don’t drink and I don’t do any other kinds of substances,” she told Rolling Stone, “but I think I have a …
Read More »The Great Lost John Malkovich Interview
Nine years ago, Rolling Stone sent me deep into the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region of France, to interview John Malkovich at the home he kept there.He had two new movies coming out: RED, starring him as an LSD-addled ex-CIA agent, and Secretariat, him as a crusty, goofy-clothes-wearing horse trainer. They displayed …
Read More »The Tragedy and Torment of Lil Peep
I t was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered …
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